This is a story about friends
by dysprositos
Summary: There's a mouse in Clint's apartment. He's not too impressed with the situation. He's going to be less impressed before all is said and done. Part of the Ongoing Adventures of Clint and Cat, sort-of sequel to This is a story about an assassin.


**Thanks to my beta, irite, for indulging me in my saccharine sweet one-shots.**

**Warnings: absurd levels of fluff.**

**I do not own The Avengers.**

* * *

"Impossible," Tony declared imperiously, managing to look down on Clint somehow, despite being a few inches shorter. "Not in my tower, no way."

Clint rolled his eyes. He'd been living with Tony long enough at this point that he was more or less used to his bullshit. "Right. Then what gnawed through my box of Froot Loops? What left its little, tiny shit in my cupboards?"

Tony shrugged. "No idea. Maybe it was a little, tiny person. Maybe it was your cat."

"My cat has a litter box, Stark. I know what his shit looks like. And he doesn't like Froot Loops."

"Barton, you can't have a damn mouse in your apartment. You have a cat. They kill mice and bugs and shit. Isn't that why you keep him around?"

Well, no, it wasn't. Clint kept the damn cat around because the stupid animal had been there when he'd needed someone, but couldn't let another person close enough to help. But Clint sure as hell wasn't going to say that to Tony Stark. So he shrugged. "Maybe my cat's not big on mice." After all, Cat had been downright scrawny when Clint had adopted him off the street. Hunting might not be his forte.

Tony just gave him a _look._

"Whatever," Clint muttered, looking down. "You can call the exterminator or I will."

"Do whatever floats your boat," Tony dismissed him. "I have work to do."

And he turned back to his holographs.

Clint sighed, but took the hint and left.

On the way back up to his apartment, he stopped by the communal living room, where Bruce was perusing files on his tablet while having lunch and absently petting Cat, Clint's aptly-named pet. Cat had the run of the private living areas of the Tower, thanks to Tony and Bruce's ingenious collar/cat flap system, and he often searched out Bruce in particular, who could not say no to the animal. To the point of sharing meals, on more than one occasion. Clint could practically see the hopeful glint in Cat's eyes from across the room as Bruce munched his sandwich.

Bruce was pretty engrossed in what he was doing, but he was willing to surrender the cat, who let himself be scooped ingloriously into Clint's arms and carried back up to Clint's apartment.

With the door shut behind him, Clint set Cat down on the kitchen counter next to pile of paperwork he had to go through before Monday.

He was due to get back into the field then, after being benched for almost nine months on account of a skull fracture that had, for several terrifying days, completely knocked out his vision. He'd regained it slowly, and even though it had now been months since it had returned completely, he'd still been out of the field. Bruce had explained how skull fractures could be tricky, and the doctors at SHIELD had agreed, and so Clint had been more than happy to spend his time helping out at SHIELD and with the Avengers in whatever ways he could until he was cleared for field duty again.

Okay, so, 'more than happy' was a bit of a lie—he'd required one hell of a pep talk from Fury before he'd seen himself as more than a now-useless 'asset (because what use is a blind sniper?)'—but once he'd gotten his head out of his ass, he'd actually discovered he was good at a lot of stuff. He helped plan missions, did briefings, trained new SHIELD agents, and even sometimes helped design new equipment for the team.

Still, even with all of that, he was going to be thrilled to get back into the field. He'd been down at the practice range almost every chance he had, once he was cleared for it, but the fact remained that it had been far, far too long since he'd shot something worth shooting.

Cat was disinclined to wait where Clint had left him, and so sauntered lazily along the counter, leaving small paw prints on top of the forms Clint needed to fill out. When he saw the marks, Clint just sighed. He was used to this by now, the way Cat seemed to get into everything. Still, he picked the animal up to stop his travels, and brought him over to the cupboard when he stored the few dried goods he kept on hand. Clint opened the cupboard and indicated the droppings within. "Look, Cat. That's mouse crap. I know that's mouse crap. And if I know it's mouse crap, then you sure as hell know it's mouse crap. So why don't we cut to the chase, and you catch the damn mouse?"

Cat gave a fussy meow and wriggled in Clint's arms, before delicately sinking the claws of one paw into Clint's shoulder.

"Point taken," Clint said with a grimace, setting the cat on the floor. "But seriously. Find the damn mouse. I don't want to call an exterminator and tell him I've got a cat who can't catch a mouse. That's embarrassing, dude."

Tail held high, Cat stalked away, as if insulted by Clint's insinuation that he couldn't catch a mouse. Clint watched him go, shaking his head. Honestly, that animal was such a drama queen.

...Don't people say that animals take after their owners?

Clint dismissed that thought outright.

* * *

He woke up the next morning, and he was alone.

This was unusual, because he generally woke up with his damn cat tangled around him, somehow taking up more of the bed than something weighing less than ten pounds had any right to.

Still, it wasn't unheard of to be abandoned in the night, especially if one of the others was having a particularly tasty breakfast, and so Clint got out of bed and showered before heading to the kitchen to get the coffee he desperately needed.

As he entered the kitchen, he looked down at Cat's bowl to see if the fat ass had eaten all his food in the night. He hadn't; there was a bit left over. There wouldn't be for long, though, because there was a white mouse sitting in front of the bowl, stuffing its face.

"Seriously?" Clint said aloud, head cocked to one side. He quickly looked around for something to trap the mouse in, eyes alighting on the metal bowl he usually filled with popcorn when he settled in for a TV marathon. Slowly, so as to not disturb the mouse (who was, by all appearances, quite taken with Cat's food), he crept over and retrieved the bowl.

But before he could drop it on top of his prey, the mouse twitched its nose and then darted away, squeezing itself underneath the refrigerator.

A second later, Cat trotted through the cat flap. Ignoring Clint completely, he made his way to his bowl and promptly set to eating the few kibbles that were left.

Clint knew it had to reek of mouse, but Cat was not perturbed by this. Indeed, he finished the few bites of food and then looked up at Clint with a plaintive meow, clearly demanding more.

"No way," Clint said. "Not until you catch the damn mouse." He looked over at the fridge, dreading moving it but knowing it had to be done. "I'll scare him out, you get him. Okay?"

Cat's response to this was a yawn, which Clint decided passed for acceptance. He walked over to the fridge and, positioning himself so that he might not throw his back out, pulled it away from the wall.

He heard a tiny alarmed squeak, and he looked down just as the mouse came out from under the fridge and darted across the kitchen. In fact, it ran straight up to Cat.

Cat looked down at the mouse huddled against him and then, instead of biting it or clawing it or anything that Clint had hoped he would do, he gently licked its head.

For a moment, Clint wasn't quite sure what to make of this. So he asked the obvious question. "Christ. When's the wedding?"

Both animals looked up at him, and then the mouse scampered away towards the bedroom. Clint sighed, exasperated. "Well, doesn't this just fucking figure? Going straight from a kiss to the bedroom, typical."

Cat did not have the decency to look chagrined by his behavior at all. In fact, he cast Clint a dirty look before following his new friend into the bedroom.

Sighing again, Clint pulled out his phone. If Cat wasn't going to be any help, then he was going to need reliable backup to get this shit done.

* * *

"You're kidding." Natasha's voice was flat, one eyebrow raised.

"No, I'm really not." It was bad enough he couldn't catch the mouse on his own and his cat was defective, but Natasha didn't need to mock him on top of all that.

But then she said something unexpected. "I'm not going to be a party to you killing your cat's new friend."

"...You're kidding."

"No, I'm really not." She smirked at him. "Seriously, don't you think that's cruel?"

This was something that he never would have expected from Natasha, and it threw him. "Uh, no. Mice are pests. It could have fleas. It could have rabies."

Natasha tilted her head slightly to one side. "The same could have been said about your cat, but you kept him anyway."

And somehow, Clint knew that all arguments of 'it's not the same' would be lost on her. Still, he tried, "Are you gonna help or not?"

"I'll help you catch it. I'm not going to help you kill it."

"Fine," Clint answered shortly. "It went into the bedroom. With the traitor. It hasn't come back out." He'd kept an eye on the door while he called her and then waited for her unhelpful self to show.

Natasha walked almost silently into the bedroom. She turned her head to the left, then to the right. Her eyes alighted on the bed. Where Cat was lying. Curled around the mouse protectively.

"That mouse doesn't have fleas or rabies," she said.

That was the least of Clint's worries right now—there was a _mouse _in his _bed_—but he still answered, "How d'you know that?"

"That's a lab mouse." As if it were obvious.

"How d'you know _that?_"

"It's white. It might be a natural albino, but white mice are almost always used in labs. It might have escaped from R&D, or even from Bruce." She approached the bed slowly, holding one hand out. The mouse slowly reached up to sniff her hand, and she took the opportunity to grab hold of him.

Cat was immediately on the defensive, growling low in his chest, but Natasha said soothingly, "It's all right, I'm not going to hurt him." She stroked the mouse's head. "He's pretty cute, isn't he?"

Clint disagreed. "That's a mouse. It's not cute."

She waved him off. Still holding the mouse, she took a few steps towards the bedroom door.

Cat got up and followed her, looking up at her with huge eyes. He mewed softly, pawing at her leg.

Natasha turned to Clint. "Okay, that's it. You've got to keep the mouse."

'What? Hell no, I don't." This situation was so close to resolved, he could just take the mouse back where it came from, easy, and now she was trying to get him to adopt vermin? No way.

She gestured down at Cat. "They're friends."

"That fucking cat is a manipulative asshole, he doesn't have 'friends.' Look, just bring it back down to the labs."

And then Natasha turned her worst assassin death glare on him. It was significantly scarier than his own. "You're adopting this mouse, Barton. I'll have Bruce bring a cage up."

Clint didn't want to argue with that expression, but he wasn't going to give up without a fight, either. "Why don't _you _adopt it, if you want it so bad?"

She sniffed imperiously. "I'm not the one whose cat is having a 'The Fox and the Hound' moment."

Damn it. Clint _hated _that movie. He'd watched it with Natasha when they'd mutually discovered that they both had a thorough (yet understandable) deficit in their Disney knowledge. Clint had teared up at the end, for obvious reasons, and he'd sworn Natasha to secrecy. As far as he knew, she'd never told anyone, but wasn't apparently above bringing it up to get her way.

And now that she'd framed this issue in that light? Jesus Christ. "Fine. Whatever. Call Bruce."

Bruce seemed surprised by the request—Natasha put him on speakerphone—but he agreed easily enough. He also agreed to bring up bedding and food and a few other items for what he called the 'escapee.' "Just don't tell Tony. You know how he feels about pets."

Natasha had replied to that with an easy, "I'll handle him if I have to."

And that was that.

As Bruce set up the new mouse habitat on a table in Clint's living room, Natasha held onto the mouse. When he was done, she gently set him in his new cage. He burrowed immediately under some of his bedding, hiding.

"Fucking mouse," Clint muttered, reading over the instructions for mouse care that Natasha had printed off his laptop.

Cat jumped up onto the table next to the cage and pressed his nose against the glass. He began to purr, and the mouse popped his head out of his hiding place and made his way over to that side of his new habitat. He pressed a paw against the glass near Cat's nose.

"Awww," Bruce and Natasha cooed.

"Fucking Cat," Clint muttered, crossing his arms over his chest. Damn it, this was straight out of a Disney movie, so sweet he could puke.

Natasha punched his arm. "Shut up, or I'll put you in a cage."

Clint was smart enough to know when to shut up. He reached a hand out to scratch Cat's ears. "Fine. You can keep this one. But if you catch a cockroach, you'd better damn well kill that shit."

Cat's response to that was a contented purr.

* * *

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